I haven't gotten any answers, but here's what I've figured out myself so far. It's useful to look at three different views of !fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee:
- https://slrpnk.net/c/fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee - all of the youtube thumbnails are present.
- https://lemm.ee/c/fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee - only some of the youtube thumbnails are present.
- https://lemmy.world/c/fullmoviesonyoutube@lemm.ee - most of the youtube thumbnails are missing
lemmy.world is running the older backend 0.19.3, which may explain its behavior. But slrpnk.net and lemm.ee are both running backend 0.19.5 so why are they behaving differently? If I compare the same post on the two servers:
I notice that the slrpnk.net one, while it does have a thumbnail, does not have the in-line images that I added and that are visible in the lemm.ee version. Possibly slrpnk.net does not allow uploaded in-line images? However, the lemm.ee version also has a video description in what appears to be Cyrillic. I read somewhere that this was due to a hosting issue. So maybe that is also responsible for the thumbnail issue. To summarize:
HYPOTHESIS: three things are responsible for image behavior differences:
- the older version of lemmy.world
- a hosting configuration of lemm.ee
- image upload restrictions of slrpnk.net